sol2 VS vemips

As someone said, make the game data-driven is a good first step but I will say, also have some sort of way to add additional game logic. For C++ games, lua is really easy to embed the interpreter in your C++ binary, read in the files from a directory (like /mods) with the C++ filesystem api new in C++17, and it's very easy to use SoL to write an API for lua specific to your game. Many games use lua in this way and it's probably the most common mod path setup.

I've only ever done this from C++, but it's using the same lua C library, so should be durable from C as well. You can look up how sol2 or any other wrapper libraries do it.

Consider sol2

This version relies on a Lua C++ wrapper called sol2 to hide Lua stack management from the developer, so creating new bindings can be done by adding a few lines of human-readable C++. It still has to be done manually, but at least sol2 is able to automatically figure out types of objects being bound, so it's not much different from our de-/serialization code.

Here's an example: sol2

Here is link number 2 - Previous text "Sol"

Have you considered using sol2? https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2 Or if you don't want to switch over, you can at least look at their code and see how they handle this.

It is half of a pun as I was inspired by [sol3](https://github.com/ThePhD/sol2) which is a lua <-> c++ wrapper. Sol means sun and the julia c-api prefixes all it's functions with jl, luna means moon so it is pronounced "jay luna"

If you want to be portable I'd recommend C++ and Lua, I used those for years and it runs on everything and there's this most amazing wrapper API which was a huge inspiration

Also, if anyone wants to see a hastily-written ELF loader that I haven't cared enough about to go back and clean up in C++, I have one here.

I suggest MIPS.

I actually wrote VeMIPS for this specific purpose.

Unfortunately, I don't remember specifically. It was about when I wrote VeMIPS and was also working on figuring out an alternative ISA for a 3d printer board, and I'd noticed that a specific conversion instruction was missing on it. Maybe it was moving a double-precision register to the general purpose registers on 32-bit? Not sure anymore. I can look over IRC logs maybe to find out.

This is the exact purpose that I wrote VeMIPS for.

Looks similar to vemips. Same rationale as well (embedding within a game or simulation).

Probably wouldn't be too hard to add Chip8 as a backend to VeMIPS, though VeMIPS presently doesn't run on Android (only Win64 and in Javascript using asm.js).

I personally dislike disassembling MIPS, and I wrote VeMIPS!

However, I did end up releasing VeMIPS, which is an embeddable MIPS32r6 emulator/VM which is heavily configurable, has a dynamic recompiler, and has instruction-level execution granularity, meaning that you can tell it "execute 10 instructions and return". This lets you implement things like cost per instruction, virtual CPUs with different performance characteristics, and so forth.